Media content streams are prevalent today, whether they are delivered to televisions, computing systems, mobile devices, gaming stations, or other types of media playback devices. The media content is generally held by an originating source, such as a central office that transmits the media content. Modernly, the media content is generally transmitted over a network, such as the Internet but may also be transmitted over other types of pathways. Generally, the media originating central offices transmit media content over unicast streams to provide user endpoints with control over media content. This causes many different unicast media streams. For example, N unicast streams must be established for N devices requesting to transmit the same media content. To minimize the load on the network due to the transmission of the media to numerous requesting media playback devices, a single multicast streams may be generated and transmitted for retrieval by users through their devices. The media originating central office can, based on the different costs associated with the different types of transmission pathways, determine a more optimal transmission pathway to transmit the media.